How Social Media Mobilizes Society

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As the Supreme Court took up the case of marriage equality last
week, some 2.7 million people changed their Facebook profile
picture to a white equal sign on a red background in solidarity.
This is just one example of how social media mobilizes people
around the world for a common cause.

In a recent study, researchers simulated how people could use
social
media (such as Facebook
and
Twitter ) to find 10 weather balloons, hidden randomly
throughout the continental United States, over the course of
several hours. They demonstrated it was possible to find the
balloons using social media alone, without any help from
traditional mass media, like TV or radio broadcasts.

The findings show that highly connected people with broad
geographic social networks are essential to the successful
mobilization of society, the researchers say. The findings were
detailed today (April 1) in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Social media strategy

Social media sites allow society to mobilize in response to
challenges that require collaboration, such as natural disasters,
search-and-rescue efforts and climate change, said study leader
Iyad Rahwan, a computer scientist at Masdar Institute in Abu
Dhabi. In the age of the Internet, cellphones and social
media, "we are able to communicate instantly with large numbers
of people, form ad hoc teams at a very large scale and exchange
crucial information in a timely manner," Rahwan said.

"But despite all of this promise, our scientific understanding of
the processes underlying social mobilization in the Internet age
is still lacking," Rahwan told LiveScience.

Rahwan and his colleagues studied how social media could be used
in the balloon-finding task, which was part of the 2009
DARPA Network Challenge. The team's simulations showed that
using social media alone resulted in a 90 percent chance of
finding all the balloons, but all the conditions had to be ideal
— "the perfect storm," Rahwan said.

The researchers ran simulations of the balloon-finding task,
using geographic and demographic information about the
participants. They focused on the strategy of the winning team,
which was from MIT.

Small world

Rallying thousands of people requires leaders who respond
rapidly, have many connections and forward information much
faster than the average person, the researchers found. In
addition, passive participants, who don't recruit others but may
help with the task if they were to come across a balloon, play an
important role.

Being successful also relied on the " small
world " phenomenon. In other words, random friendships that
spanned big geographical distances were successful in mobilizing
people because these long-range connections quickly spread the
word about the balloon search, Rahwan said.

The "findability" of the balloons depended on both the population
density of the people searching for them and how well the balloon
was camouflaged, the researchers found. Objects may be easier to
hide in
densely populated areas, like Manhattan, than in areas with
medium-density populations, because they can blend in more.

The simulations show the importance of social media in recruiting
people for a cause — whether it is finding balloons or finding a
missing child. "It is simply impossible to do this without the
ability to broadcast to all of your acquaintances ― something
that is very easy using sites like Facebook and Twitter," Rahwan
said.

But in order for social networks to be successful, they must be
operating at the limit of their speed and efficiency, or the
efforts run a risk of failure, he said.